Meet The Science Nerd Whose Face Is About To Be Plastered On YouTube Ads Everywhere

If you live in New York City or Chicago, chances are you've seen
the enormous YouTube ads adorning some billboards and subway
trains. Nerdy baker
Rosanna Pansino and wacky comedy duo Epic
Rap Battles of History are among those who have been
featured in recent months.

The latest YouTube channel to make an appearance is SciShow, an
educational program hosted by Hank Green, Michael Aranda,
and Caitlin Hofmeister. The team makes six videos a
week, with each video answering a question relating to a number
of scientific topics, from biology and evolution to astronomy and
space travel.

The ad
campaign is starting to show up on signs and public transit, and
a spot premiered during the Season 5 premiere of AMC's "The
Walking Dead" on Sunday.

"Personally, it feels really weird. My Twitter exploded,
our followers and subscribers exploded," Green tells Business
Insider. "A friend of mine sent me a picture of me on the side of
a bus, and that is, in some ways, even weirder than being on
TV."

With more than 2 million subscribers and 210 million views,
SciShow may be a big success now, but it got its start with a
different channel, one that was much more informal than this
one.

Brothers Hank and John Green uploaded their
first YouTube video on Jan. 1, 2007. Called "Brotherhood
2.0," each brother would send a goofy message to each other on
whatever topic they felt like talking about that day.

They uploaded the videos to a channel they called "vlogbrothers"
and soon found a wide audience was tuning in to watch. Still, the
vlogbrothers experiment was just a fun activity, and the brothers
figured they should start a side project in case it wasn't still
paying the bills in a few years.

That side project was VidCon, a
conference of YouTube creators held annually in Anaheim, Calif.
In 2010, the conference's first year, 1,400 people attended. In
2014, attendance swelled to 18,000.

"I never
would’ve imagined the path that it took," Green says. "I see
YouTube like the transition from movies to TV. And we're still in
the early days."

It turns out Hank and John were wrong about vlogbrothers, too.
The channel's audience grew so widely after a few years that they
were contacted by the YouTube team, which offered to help them
start another project.

"My brother and I had this successful channel that really had no
format. It had no format, but we loved — and continue to love —
doing it," Hank Green says. "We saw that the direction online
video was taking was still an emphasis on personality, but a
larger emphasis on actually doing something, in a more branded
format, where you do the same thing every episode and people come
to expect that."

Hank and John pitched two educational channel ideas to YouTube —
one called CrashCourse,
which taught eight different courses in a series of short
videos (John is the author of several best-selling novels,
including "The Fault in Our Stars" and "Looking for Alaska"); and
another one called SciShow, which focused on scientific topics
(Hank has degrees in biochemistry and environmental
studies).

YouTube approved both of the ideas, gave the brothers some
startup funding, and a year later, both channels had close to 1
million subscribers.

"At the time it was just the two of us, so we needed the help to
kickstart things," Green says. "We were really excited to be
spending money on educational content."

SciShow premiered on Jan. 2, 2012, with a video on how
non-Newtonian fluids can save lives.

SciShow has grown a great deal since then, and the team now
employs a full editorial, production, and operations staff. Green
works on between 20 and 25 videos a week across multiple
channels.

"We juggle it by having lots of help," he says. "I've never
worked this hard in my life."

No topic is off-limits at SciShow. Green has a final say on the
script, but the writers generally have a lot of freedom to cover
topics they're interested in, or questions asked by readers in
the comment section or social media sites.

"Things like Ebola, genetically modified food, or nuclear power —
these are things that are important, and a lot of people have
made up their minds about it already," Green says. "We focus
on doing the topic justice without caging to pressures
of people who disagree with science. Science is
everywhere."

To coincide with the launch of the national ad campaign, Green is
releasing a series of videos that answer Google's most-searched
for questions with science. Today, he answers "How can I get rid
of the hiccups?"

Every weekday
until Oct. 28, SciShow will release a video covering Google's
other biggest questions, including the science behind love, the
Earth's age, beard-growing, the meaning of life, calories, the
sky's color, water, sleep, and energy.

Green says he's excited about the campaign and the potential it
has for bringing attention to all the people doing amazing work
on YouTube.

"I started making YouTube
videos without there being a way to monetize them. The fact that
I get to do it for a living is a happy accident," he says.
"There
are still times that I feel worn down by the fact that a lot of
people in my life don’t understand how cool this is, and I do
think this campaign helps legitimize that."